Authors: John D. MacDonald
Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his rented room in the heart of the Cuban colony along Southwest Eighth Street in West Miami. His second-floor room in the peeling stucco building had four windows across the front overlooking Eighth Street. They were
double-hung windows, all with the bottom sash opened as far as they would go. He had taken the screens out and stacked them against the wall as invitation to any elusive breeze. Eighth Street was also Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, and the big diesel tractor-trailer trucks halted by the traffic signal a half block away, made a blue stench and resonant fartings as they worked their way back up through the gears, overwhelming the piercing nasal agonies of the gypsy singer on the big stereo juke in the cantina underneath his room.
His desk was a four-by-eight sheet of marine plywood laid across three two-drawer filing cabinets. On one wall he had scotch-taped detailed maps of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, Venezuela. He had made marks on all the maps, a private alphabetical and numerical code cross-referenced to file cards which were in a personal shorthand meaningless to anyone but himself. He had improvised an open bookcase of boards and cinderblock, and it was stacked with reference works, the overflow piled on a table beside the shelves. On another wall he had hung a big cork board to which he thumbtacked working outlines, notes to himself, reminders of appointments.
He had a sagging bed, a chest of drawers, a noisy floor fan, two straight chairs, a fraying grass rug, a shallow closet, a key to the bathroom at the back of the second-floor hallway, and an old rebuilt Underwood standard. He was a very fast four-finger typist, using unlined sheets of yellow legal-size paper. He turned such sheets in at the editorial desk at the paper. For the magazine work, he would take his final draft down the street to the bakery where Señora de Onís, wife of the owner, would type them properly and carefully onto white bond with two good carbon copies for twenty cents a page. In Havana she had been a private secretary in a large insurance agency.
Raoul Kelly had worked all morning in his underwear shorts, the floor fan hurling the stifling air at his naked back. Sweat found its
tickling way down through the thick mat of black hair on his chest and belly. The sheets of copy paper stuck to the undersides of his forearms when he rested them on the desk, and had to be peeled away. Just within reach was a little radio with a cracked gold and white plastic case. He kept it at a station which announced each news break with a grandiose blast of trumpets, kept it at a volume where he could hear the trumpets and nothing else, and would hear them and reach out without conscious thought to turn the volume up.
He was doing an article in
depth
—a phrase which never failed to irritate him—about the background, present, and guessable future of subversion in Venezuela. From time to time he would refresh his memory by finding the right portion of the three hours of tape he had recorded during an interview with one of El Caballo’s underground agents who had defected after two years in Caracas, had slipped into the states illegally, and had been fingered for Kelly by the sister of the man who was hiding him.
Though he knew it would annoy his newspaper, he had decided to place the article in, he hoped,
The Atlantic
, and let the wire services pick up the news breaks from the text when it was published.
It was going reasonably well, but his concentration was shaky because of the letter in the shallow straw bowl he used as an inbasket. If he could decide how to answer it, then he could forget it.
It was on the creamy bond of the Waterman Foundation:
My dear Raoul Kelly
,
I am afraid I must be more explicit about the special problems of organization we are facing here in setting up Project Round-Table. Not least among the many reasons we asked you to join with us would be to have you, as an Area Coordinator, help select, recruit and train those field investigators who would work under your direction
.
There is an increasing pressure upon us from the Director and
the Board of Trustees to establish an operational structure. By dint of special pleading, motivated by my respect for your work and knowledge of your background, and also by the enlightening two days I spent in your company, I have induced my colleagues to grant one small additional grace period, but I fear that if we cannot have your affirmative answer by that date, we shall have to extend our invitation to the alternative choice, the man I told you about
.
You must make a decision on or before the fifteenth day of next month, and the sooner you can decide, the more helpful it will be to me. We need you
.
Cordially and hopefully
,
G. Emmett Addyson, Deputy Director
I can make out, he thought. I can keep on doing what I am doing, which is, in effect, a one-man version of their Project Round-Table. In a world where the semantics of politics is like smoke in the wind, nothing is gained by ringing words, exhortation, cries of alarum. Facts move the world.
He turned back several pages and looked at one of the facts in the article he had just finished:
Just after dusk on November eighth last year an estimated seven tons of weapons and explosives was ferried ashore from the Polish freighter
Trogir
and offloaded on the beach five miles east of Rio Caribe on the Peninsula de Paris in the province of Sucre, where approximately twenty men with pack animals, under the direction of one Ramon Profeta, a Cuban national, accepted delivery and transported the material to a secret arsenal near Cumanacoa. Among the supplies were five 60-mm mortars
of Chinese manufacture and four hundred rounds of ammunition, including one hundred white phosphorus mortar shells.
Orderly, triple-checked, plausible and ultimately provable, as was the shameful illiteracy rate in the Republic of Panama, the record infant-mortality rate, and the recorded voice of the President of the Republic saying, “The question is not
whether
we will have a Castro-type revolution, but
when
we will have it.”
But he yearned for access to the great flow of economic and sociological and political information the huge grant by the Waterman Foundation could create. Facts could then be interrelated, timetables predicted, causes isolated, countermeasures recommended. Facts in abundance, fed into the twin computers of the human mind and the transistor could illuminate all the misty patterns of conflict and change. Otherwise it was all blindfold chess where the opponent’s moves were neither announced nor recorded.
Yet he had promised, on his honor, to look after Francisca.
Just as he finished his penciled corrections, he heard the trumpet call of news once more and turned the volume up.
Furious debate in the Senate on the proposal to recruit mercenary combat battalions in Japan and the Philippines, uniform them in a distinct fashion to sustain nationalistic pride, staff the battalions with American officers, and use these people to fight the brushfire wars which were promising to last a hundred years, giving each man after twenty years of service the option to return to his home place, or accept United States citizenship. Mercenary was as dirty a word as empire.
And then the announcer said, “The official investigation and hearings on the Muñeca tragedy in the Bahamas which resulted in the death of Texas millionaire Bixby Kayd, his beautiful young second wife, his grown children, Stella and Roger, and his daughter’s
guest, Miss Leila Boylston of Harlingen, Texas, have now ended. Captain Garry Staniker has been cleared of any suspicion of negligence. His wife, Mary Jane Staniker, also perished in the explosion and fire which sank the yacht a few miles north of Andros Island on the night of the thirteenth, just two weeks ago today. Staniker, who was marooned for a week with serious injuries before being rescued by a pleasure boat out of Jacksonville, was earlier listed as being in critical condition, but improved rapidly enough to be interrogated earlier this week, and it is expected he will be released from the Princess Margaret Hospital at Nassau sometime next week. In a prepared statement released an hour ago, Captain Staniker said he was pleased at the decision of the Board of Inquiry and felt it was just and fair. He refused to answer any questions about the tragedy or about his future plans.”
Raoul Kelly tilted his chair back and slowly scratched at the sweat-damp bristle on his chin. Damn the pack-rat mind of the newspaperman, he thought. Grab everything that has a curious shine to it and stuff it into the back of the nest. And then, in odd moments, keep trying to fit the little pieces into a pattern.
After the weather news—thunderstorms during the night, clear and cooler tomorrow with a northeast wind—he turned the volume down. He had not gone hunting for background on the Staniker story, but he had read everything he had come across, from the two columns about Mister Bix in
Time
to Dud Weldon’s carefully researched history of Staniker’s maritime career in the
Record
.
He recalled the way, in Weldon’s feature story, Cristen Harkinson had given Staniker a clean bill, and that Weldon had not exercised his considerable talent for innuendo in trying to make something of the fact she had been Senator Fontaine’s special friend, and Kayd was known to have been associated in some vague business way with men Fontaine knew well. So it meant Weldon had put his own stamp of approval on the Harkinson woman.
There was a long scream of rubber, a janglingly expensive crunch. He leaned out of a window and saw two cars partway up the block, their front corners merged and locked in a tangle of torn metal, two men getting out of the two cars, starting to wave their fists at each other. Tempers ran short in this weather.
He turned his chair to sit facing his fan. He could not dismiss his uncomfortable awareness of certain facts which, had Dud Weldon known them, would have given him leverage for a far fatter feature.
Kayd had visited the Harkinson woman on the last day of March, over two weeks before he had returned aboard the Muñeca and hired Staniker. And Staniker and the Harkinson woman had been having a lengthy affair.
The Crissy-Staniker setup was not likely to be known. Even without the planned isolation of the house Fontaine had given her, an intimate arrangement between a woman and her hired captain was not anything which would be likely to attract any interest in the steamy social climate of the Miami area, even if the affair continued long after the lady had given up boating. It would be of moment only to those it happened to affect in some way—Crissy Harkinson, Garry Staniker, Francisca, Mary Jane Staniker and one sweaty Cuban newspaperman.
“And so what?” he said aloud. What has it got to do with anything? He’s been cleared.
And, of course, one could not take any chances with ’Cisca’s hard-won adjustment. The only
possible
reason for opening up the can of worms would be to find out if some sort of curious conspiracy had resulted in the sinking of the Muñeca. And, if so, the whole story would suddenly become twice as big as it had ever been. ’Cisca would have to testify as to Kayd’s visiting the house, as well as to the relationship between Crissy and the Captain. All news media would zero in on one emotionally disturbed girl, and they would unearth every portion of her personal history. It was obvious she could not
endure that sort of exposure, that intensity of focus of public interest.
He leaned and picked up Addyson’s letter, scanned it again, flipped it back into the basket. Dilemma-time, he thought. Problems with no solutions.
Just as he was trying to stop thinking about the whole thing, an inadvertent process of logic took it one step further. If there was indeed some kind of dangerous and deadly motive underlying the loss of the Muñeca, it would surely occur to Staniker and the Harkinson woman that Francisca had seen Kayd in Crissy’s house, and that she could verify the Staniker-Harkinson relationship.
Assume a maximum shrewdness and deadliness, and you had to suppose that they would further guarantee their own safety by effectively silencing the little Cuban maid, no matter how stupid Crissy assumed her to be. In fact they might think stupidity more dangerous to them than guile. It would be natural to tidy up now the most immediate danger was over.
So get her out of there, Kelly, just in case. And before el Capitán returns to his pussycat.
He showered, shaved, put on a fresh sports shirt and slacks, left the manuscript at the bakery, and drove down to the Ingraham Highway, heading for the Harkinson place.
In the development house of his parents, a cement block house with a red tile roof on a small lot beside a weedy canal, Oliver Akard lay upon his bed in his underwear shorts, the last of the daylight coming through the window beside the bed making oily highlights on the gleam of perspiration on his long muscular legs. His hands were laced behind his head. When there were two hesitant knocks at the closed bedroom door he did not answer. The door opened slowly
and his mother peered in, then came into the room, closing the door behind her.
“Sonny? Did I wake you up? I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
She came and sat on the foot of his bed, facing him. He moved his legs to make room for her. He felt a remote fondness for her, tinged with nostalgia, as if he were looking at a picture of her long after she had died. But he also felt a restless irritation at what he knew was coming. She verified it with a long long sigh.
“What’s happening to you, dear? What’s made you change so?”
“Why should something be happening?”
“We’re so worried, Sonny. Your father is terribly upset. You’ve always been such a good boy. We’ve always been so proud of you, dear.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“There’s no need to take the name of the Lord in vain, son.”
“If he’d get off my back he wouldn’t have any reason to get upset, right? He kept riding me, didn’t he? I’ve got cuts coming, and if I want to use them, that’s my business.”